One of the Last Local Bloggers Creates a Snapshot of Her Neighborhood

“I like asking questions,” says Katia Kelly. “It’s part of my nature — when I don’t know the answer to something, I often say, ‘Hey, pardon me for asking, but…’”

When Kelly created a blog in 2006 from her home in Carroll Gardens, she thought the name was appropriate. It captured her inquisitive personality and, very simply, summarized the way she interacted with her neighbors. This is how news spread about a local store going out of business or a new apartment building being constructed.

Pardon Me For Asking, Kelly’s “little website,” as she calls it, has grown far beyond its original intent. Although she insists she is not a reporter, refusing to even call herself a professional writer, the blog she started over a decade ago has been in front of one of the biggest local — and more recently, national — stories of the year.

In February, Kelly explains, she was taking another look at a property that had interested her for some time at 377 Union Street. Construction on the brownstone had stalled and a stop work order sign had been taped to the plywood covering the front door. A messy renovation was her first thought. But the lingering disarray was suspicious.

A woman who lives a few houses down on Union Street happened to notice Kelly taking pictures, and the two began a conversation. “She said she had an illustrious neighbor,” Kelly remembers. “Paul Manafort was not high on the list of people I would have guessed at that moment.”

Since the Manafort story broke — and continues to keep breaking — Kelly has been featured in a number of high-profile publications that position her as an eagle-eyed neighborhood blogger scooping the mainstream media.

What is less said is that Kelly is one of the few local bloggers left, once part of a loose constellation of small neighborhood websites, most of which have shuttered. And with the recent closures of DNAinfo and Gothamist, local coverage has been gutted even further.

For Kelly, this has been an ongoing problem. She first attracted notice, she says, because she was attending community board meetings not covered by reporters. “I was often amazed to be the only one there with a pen and a paper, taking notes,” she says. Neighborhoods that once had beat reporters were, by the time she started the blog, not being covered at all.

But starting a blog, or even writing in general, was never a plan. Kelly was born in Germany, and at the age of 9 moved to the Auvergne area in France after Michelin Tires, her father’s employer, relocated him there. Five years later, the company moved her father again, this time to the United States.

She came to New York City to study fashion at the Parsons School of Design. “I was in the fashion business for a nanosecond, about three years after I graduated,” Kelly says. “Just long enough to realize it was not where I was going to spend the rest of my life.”

It was during this time that she met her husband, Glenn Kelly, who had moved to Carroll Gardens in 1977. “He whisked me away to Brooklyn,” she says, where the two continue to reside. For a short period, she started a company called Katatinka that created handmade children’s clothes but spent most of her first years in Brooklyn raising her children, who are now grown.

“I started too early,” she says about her business. “Back then, Brooklyn was not what it is now, and there was nothing like Etsy. I did everything out of my house and sold to some boutiques in Manhattan.”

When she wasn’t putting her design skills to use on the renovation of their brownstone, Kelly says, she started to become more involved in community affairs. Her husband, who owns an office-furniture business called GTK Company, helped found Friends of Carroll Park in 1990 and has been involved with the Carroll Gardens Neighborhood Association. Kelly has more recently become invested in activism around the Gowanus Canal, as a member of local group FROGG, aka Friends and Residents of Greater Gowanus.

“I try to back it up — I don’t just want to shoot my mouth off,” Kelly says about her dedication to local issues. “I’ve come to the conclusion that the best thing the community can do for Gowanus is to leave it alone. I think an overall rezoning on the scale that city planning is proposing is just wrong.”

Pardon Me For Asking has already lasted much longer than expected, but Kelly is unclear about how long it will last. “I spend way too much time doing it,” she says. “I’ve felt that I had run out of things to say many times.”

Kelly and her husband go to France every summer, where her mother insisted on keeping the house after they relocated to the United States. (Typically, on the way over, they will make a stop in whatever European city has a cheap flight.) When she returns, she always asks herself, “Do I really want to start again?”

“I hope I’m not going to be 80 years old writing my little posts,” Kelly says. “I’ve always said that if there’s nothing left to say I’ll stop. But there’s always something happening.”

[Photos by Susan De Vries unless noted otherwise]